This article first appeared in the October 2001 issue of Electronic Musician Magazine
Veteran guitarist David Torn is busier and more widely heard than ever, contributing to albums, film soundtracks, and sample CDs. In many ways, Torn is a textbook electronic musician: he uses technology in creative, sophisticated ways and makes a living as a recording artist, sound designer, composer, and producer. Moreover, he works in a personal studio, Cell Labs, which he built at his Bearsville, New York, home in 1993 to accommodate his projects.
Torn's 30-year career is driven by his passion for adventurous, improvisational, left-field music. In pursuing that passion, he pushes the limitations of his gear. His musicianship and mastery of technology are broadly appreciated in the music industry and have always opened doors for him.>
During the 1970s, Torn established himself in jazz-fusion and art-rock circles. His album catalog spans the '80s and '90s, and his solo efforts include Cloud About Mercury(1986),What Means Solid, Traveller?(1996), andThe David Torn Collection(1998).
Torn has also collaborated with Mick Karn, David Sylvian, Me'Shell Ndegéocello, Will Calhoun, Jan Garbarek, Tony Levin, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and k. d. lang, among others.
Torn produced his latest solo album, Oah, in Cell Labs and released it under the identity Splattercell on his Cell Division label last year. Torn devised the new name to distinguish his foray into electronic music from the progressive jazz-fusion style that defined his earlier career.
Torn's brand of sonic mayhem has become a hot commodity in Hollywood. He helps noted composers score major releases, and his recent credits include Traffic, A Knight's Tale, Three Kings, and Heist. Torn also works with Human, a New York-based collective of Clio Award-winning composers. Torn's edgy, iconoclastic sounds can also be found on sample CDs by Q Up Arts (Tonal Textures and Pandora's Toolbox) and Sonic Foundry (Textures for Electronica and Film Music). A double-CD set for Q Up Arts is in the works.
At the root of it all is Torn's fascination with loop-based music. One could say that Torn is a pioneer in that genre. In the early '80s, he assembled a guitar-looping rig that he still uses today. It consists of two devices for looping guitar or any other instrument (including voice) and a rack of gear for processing those loops.
“Before I built this studio, the thing that interested me was the idea of treating audio data as people were treating MIDI data,” Torn says. “When the opportunity arose to do it in an economically feasible way, I just jumped right in.” These days, Torn routes the output of his looping rig into Emagic's Logic Audio on his Mac G3 to create what he calls “rhythmically organized materials,” or cells, that serve as building blocks for his music.
Interestingly, Torn was once disenchanted with electronic music. “Many years ago, I had completely given up on anything MIDI,” he says. “There was a dangerous moment with MIDI when everybody used the same sounds, grooves all felt the same, and people were making music to fit into a particular box.”
However, Torn finds that today's electronica is fresh and inventive. “I'm enthused by Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Amon Tobin, Talvin Singh, and Boards of Canada,” he says. He adds that electronica “often comes from a forward-looking source, and then, all of a sudden, it's deep in the pop culture. TV commercials are musically more creative than anything you hear in film these days. I'm waiting for the next mind-blowing drum record, whoever makes it. Right now the technology is so wide open that I look forward to hearing more original music.”
Torn graciously took time out from his busy schedule to discuss Cell Labs, the creation of Oah, his tracking methods, his looping rig, and his television and film work.
Looking at your list of credits, I can see that you have worked on an impressive number of projects in the past year alone.
We actually hit upon the single most active period of my career as a musician. I'm a working maniac. So many things are happening, and it all feels so good. I've taken to working in my project studio. The greatest thing that I did for myself and that a record company [CMP] did for me was to help me build this room in 1993; there's no going back now. I often do sessions for other people here — including big films — and I just don't leave home. [Laughs.] I'm very tool oriented and have been since day one. My abilities as a musician are more conceptual than skill oriented. I never considered myself a great guitar player and still don't. My skill has always been more sonic or textural. I feel good about using the studio as a barrier against outside pressures to create within certain boundaries. It's a positive thing to make music that is different from anything else around, that is personal. That's been the focus around here.
Is Cell Labs a room within your house?
No, it's separate from my house. We have a garage that is something like 46-by-22, and I commandeered a space that's about 16-by-22 within it. My big window looks out into the forest behind my house.
Is Cell Labs tuned?
Not at all. It was not designed acoustically; it's just a box, and I do whatever I can in here. There's a very small sweet spot for monitoring playback. If you play drums or electric guitar in here, it's pretty overpowering, and you have to work hard to control the sound because the room sings a little bit.
Taking that into account, how do you mic drums?
I pick two microphones and either have them on the sides of the kit — if they're matched microphones — or use an overhead with something placed a little bit higher than the bass drum and about a foot and a half to two feet away from the bass drum. In my room, it might be better to use more microphones so that you get more detail and less of the room, but I've made a lazy man's decision to make the best out of the warts in the sound. I don't believe that you need a $3,000-a-day room with fully vintage equipment in order to get sounds that are musical.
So you believe in making the most with what you have?
Yeah! There are some strange and varied arguments for it. They run the gamut from Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, which a lot of people feel is his most moving work ever, recorded on a 4-track cassette machine, to some of the great records of the hip-hop world. You have the Squarepusher paradigm, where there's a guy with an [Akai] MPC2000 and an Atari computer making some of the most incredible sounds in 15 years. I like to make the music feel like it's moving forward and not getting trapped in technical details. I'm an engineer's nightmare, I am. [Laughs.]
How else do you get drum sounds?
On basses and drum kits, I often use the dbx Subharmonic Synthesizer to get some tone out of that stuff that hangs between 38 and 50 cycles, because I like that impact. I listen on Genelec 1030As, and they tend not to reproduce those frequencies very tonefully, so I end up using the Subharmonic Synthesizer, which is the bane of my mixes when I take this stuff to a mastering engineer. We have to roll off the frequencies between 38 and 42 cycles because I've overdone it. Sometimes it starts masking the actual fundamental tone in the frequencies that are in the hundreds. I like that big overhyped bottom that's in a lot of dance tracks.
How do you mic guitars?
I record almost all electric guitars direct to disc. My Rivera amp head feeds an ADA Ampulator, which feeds the guitar rack, and the rack's outputs feed an ADA Microcab II. When I do use microphones, I use the [CAD] E-200 and attempt to get it as close as possible off-axis to the speaker. I usually move the microphone around until the capsule starts to shut down a little bit. It's either the E-200 or a Shure SM57, which I don't do the capsule-breaking trick with. One other microphone of choice is a Sennheiser 441, and that's it. In a big room, I will ask for ribbon mics as ambient mics if I have the opportunity. But in my own studio, I almost never use microphones — not for electric guitar. At the volume that I like to play guitar, I would drive my neighbors insane at five o'clock in the morning, not to mention the fact that my wife would have left me many years ago. [Laughs.]
In 1999 you completedOah,a fierce electronic tour de force that you concocted withinLogic Audio. How did you conceive it?
I work with music on a cellular basis. I use live looping to improvise textures, rhythms, or riffs, and I document them all. I set up inputs to a DAT or the computer and just let the playing side of me flow. I do the same thing when I'm working on samples that I'm creating on the computer. I've been working with live looping for so long that it has become more focused, working with what I call cells. I'm not one to take samples and use them verbatim. I usually mangle things pretty deeply. It's like mixing very disparate ingredients and trying to make them work together. When I sense a compositional role for something, I will work my ass off to make things fit together.
When I have an inspiration, I want my first reaction, so I move very quickly. Then, I listen to things over and over again before I'll play something, and in that listening process, I work on minutiae within the piece itself. I'll do stupid little things like move sliding rhythms around against each other, put delays on certain rhythms, or maybe program a synth. It's in service to the fact that eventually I'm going to play on top. It's an odd attitude, but I think that it serves my ability to capture my own spontaneity. It doesn't matter to me if that spontaneity is noticeable to the end listener, but it's important for me to know that it's there.
This Splattercell thing is all over the map. The source material comes from different places. I'll give you a couple of examples. [Drummer] Matt Chamberlain was in town working on a record. He set up a bizarre little kit in this tiny room, and we put up two mics. I'd throw ideas at Matt; he would play; and I would process him live straight to DAT through fuzz boxes, wah-wah pedals, and stuff. After Matt split that day, I began to organize these pieces. As the album was falling together, I would see if I could find something from Matt's material that would suit the tunes. Then I would start chopping, splicing, and audio-mangling stuff until the tracks fit, either as overdubs or as beds.
On the other hand, I had Geoff Gordon do some stuff on a gubgubbi [a one-string percussion instrument from Bengal] and other Indian and Middle Eastern percussion instruments. He was in San Francisco, so I sent him to Kit Walker's studio up in San Rafael, California. I told him, “Do your recording in Logic Audio, and here are the tempos.” I e-mailed him a list of feels, and he sent back 600 megs, following my loose directions. Then I did the same stuff with his material as I'd done with Matt's. For example, track 5 [“Busy Cutting Crap”] has this wonderful gubgubbi track in it that I processed, chopped up, and reordered like you might do in [Propellerhead's] ReCycle, except I don't use ReCycle. Kit did a good job of recording Geoff. I told Kit not to worry about it too much because everything was going to pass through some mangling; just make sure that the phase of the stereo tracks is coherent. Massive bands of frequency won't disappear in mono because, as you may or may not know, that's the way I listen, in mono.
Why is that?
It's a practical reality: I have only one ear that works at all. The other ear is 100 percent deaf, so I'm sensitive to phase and phase relationships. I listen on near-field monitors that are pretty close together in stereo. Everything in my recordings that's in stereo is imagined in my head. I often have people, like one of my kids or my local friends, come by, and I say, “Does this seem pretty centered to you?” [Laughs.] I'm really careful about this stuff because I only hear in mono.
Track 9, “Chrysanthemum Bang,” was a collaborative effort. How did it come together?
That was me, Zack Alford the drummer, and [bassist] Fema Ephron just jamming in a local studio, Applehead, live to 2-track. It was all improvised. There were a couple of great riffs, so I pulled them off the DATs. I liked this one set of grooves that we had played, and I slowed it down by about 40 percent. I processed it, chopped it up, formed it into a tune, and started overdubbing. I credited [drummer] Abe Laboriel Jr. with the samples of his that I used because, well, it's respectful to do so.
My intention is to inject some organic materials played by skilled players with a lot of feeling into what we've begun to call electronica. I love hearing the technology used and abused, but for me, it needs to have people playing; it needs to feel like there's some sweat and some crap in it. Having the root of the cellular data be somewhat organic continues to be important to me because I've done a bunch of purely electronic things, and they often feel like they're missing something, something visceral.
Another example of this is the tune “Is Love,” which was drummer Dean Sharp and I in this room together. He was playing a Taos drum kit, and I was playing this little Scandinavian pump-organ thing that I have. There was no microphone set up, so I turned on an Olympus microcassette recorder, which I always keep around, and recorded what we were doing. Within Logic Audio, I began to overdub a synthesized bass. I put a vocal in, and there are some scrunchy guitar textures.
When you process live tracks, do you look for something specific to build on, or do you accidentally discover things that work?
An improvised guitar solo on track 7, “A Dozen Books to Break the Fall,” was pretty processed to begin with. I liked the feel of it, but I thought it wasn't fitting in. I used a rather severe automation process on that solo because I felt like the processing should flow in the same way that the solo itself flowed. I wanted the processing to match the music rather than say, “Put this plug-in on here” without any motion at all. I processed it in [Arboretum's] Hyperprism using automation within Logic Audio. Once I had done that and bounced the file, I threw it into [U&I Software's] MetaSynth and did some odd filtering on it to soften the blow, because it was a pretty harsh solo. The ring modulator/pitch changer that I used in Hyperprism created some jarring effects that were too jarring for the tune, so I used MetaSynth to soften the blow.
Your guitar-looping rig is at the root of your music, and you haven't yet touched on that. How do you typically process sounds?
The looping thing starts with an actual playing event. I have a number of instruments that I built myself, and they all have an optional output to the same processing devices. I have the option for other input devices: a microphone for feedback, microcassette recorders, radios, clocks, an analog drum machine from India. All kinds of odd devices are input through the same system. I can make a series of loops live without anybody hearing them, including myself, until I fade them in with pedals.
I might use some feedback. I may insert harmonica notes, my voice, or a different instrument, like a pedal steel — generally in real time, all in the same running loop — while I'm listening to a track or a click or watching the picture. I put the stuff into the computer and start tweaking further. It's hard to describe. They're improvised loops that I process like crazy.
I understand the rig has evolved during the past 15 years or so. Please describe it and how it works.
I have a very strange guitar setup: odd footpedals and even odder ways to make sounds on the guitar manually, in addition to the footpedals. There's a send from the guitar to an outside rack with two live looping devices: my old standby, which is a modified Lexicon PCM 42, and an unmodified Oberheim Echoplex Digital Pro. The PCM 42 was originally modified for me by Gary Hall to have more looping memory than the stock units. The PCM 42 sounds wonderful. You can alter the pitch using voltages, and it's nearly impossible to do anything of a recognizable rhythmic value. I approach it quite differently than the Echoplex, which is deadly for rhythmic looping.
The loops are then processed by a Lexicon PCM 80, an Electrix Filter Factory, a Waldorf filter, and a Korg Electribe ES-1 — it could be one or all or none of these things. I also have a Big Briar Moogerfooger pedal that processes the output of the loops. All of these processing devices are in a separate rack with a mixer that has a single stereo output. I control the sends and returns of the looping devices and processors so that I can make a mélange of two or three loops, process them all differently, and set up feedback loops. That's what goes to all of the sessions. Sometimes the computer comes along, too, because people like the postprocessing thing. I can also do certain things in real time on the computer that are pretty interesting, especially with VST plug-ins and Logic, but specifically with some really screwy ensembles that I've built in [Native Instruments] Reaktor. My favorite program for the Macintosh is Reaktor, not only because of its ability to manipulate live input and samples but also for its ability to design your own sound generation.
Additionally, I can step sequence the output of the PCM 42 into the Korg. I can step sequence a gating effect so that what was once a completely ambient and nonrhythmic event can then be step sequenced live and then synced to a computer or to the Oberheim Echoplex Digital Pro, for example, which is my rhythmic looping device. It's a strange system. I rewire it every time I'm going to do something. It's a five-space rack with a lot of stuff on top.
Plus, I have the pre-beta version of the Electrix Repeater here, which I've been involved with for six to eight months now, and that's pretty exciting. It will become my featured looping device. With the Repeater, you can actually improvise a loop at the beginning of a session or a gig and then recall it at the end — at a different pitch, in a different time signature, and at a different tempo.
This rig has held up after all these years on the road?
Oh yeah. I started touring around '82 or '83, so it's banged around quite a bit. It hasn't altered that much over the years, funnily enough. All of the devices have changed except for the two Lexicon units, although the PCM 80 used to be a PCM 70.
Tell me about the film projects that you do.
I'm happy creating and working for people like [composers] Carter Burwell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Howard Shore, Cliff Martinez, Pete Nashell, and Teddy Shapiro. Carter does a broad range of scores — really beautiful ones like Kalifornia or The Chamber, in which I'm mostly playing acoustic guitar. Carter wanted the acoustic guitar with all of the live processing that I track as a part of the sound so that the guitar would better meld with the orchestral parts. I would also texturalize the sound and do some live looping that would help marry that sound even further — the orchestral sound with this very sweet, low-volume acoustic guitar. Again, every situation is different. With Sakamoto, it's so far been all about noise and improvising to things that are completely written.
Often, some percentage of what I play for another composer is written, but it seems to be an increasingly smaller percentage. I'm not just a guy who creates ambient loops — I can read a score; I can see where the chord movements are; and I'm technologically proficient enough to get what might normally be a static, looping ambient texture to change keys along with the arc of a picture and score.
How do you contribute to a film score?
Every film has its own life story. Take Traffic, for example. [Director] Steven Soderbergh used a temporary score with Brian Eno tracks. Cliff Martinez called me and said, “How do I do this? It looks great, but it's not my style of writing. Jeff Rona said I should call you.” Cliff sent me the script and some scenes from the picture. I would look at the picture; then, we'd talk about some specific elements that he needed and what kind of key signatures or chordal movements he wanted — but more in an emotional, painterly way than in a specific way. I looked at the picture with and without the temp score and started working here at home. I provided him with 400 or 500 megs worth of materials that I thought looked really good with the film, and he started using them as building blocks. He sent me a couple of cues that he asked me to overdub on, which I did here — again, using the guitar-based loops and some more extreme things that were based on guitar loops. I was to go to Los Angeles and finish everything up out there with him, but as it turned out, everybody was happy with the way things were going, so I kept working here by myself. Every film is different.
There is no longer a clear line between sound design and music. I think that's good. It represents a maturity in the installed listening base in the world; we expect to hear textural movement in our sonics, even if they're behind a piece of music that is somehow more classically composed or a song that has a standard pop structure or whatever. I think that's one of the reasons why I've become sort of in demand in the film world — I cross the boundary myself.
You've also produced recording artists such as Tim Berne, Mick Karn, McKinley, Andy Rinehart, and Douglas September. How do you handle your role as record producer?
Most of the people whom I work with as a producer are independent, so we're always dealing with budgetary constraints and time constraints, which are good. Sometimes people should kick their own asses to get something done. I didn't mean to be an engineer; it's certainly not my forte! When you're as tool intensive and as sonically oriented as I am, the lines begin to blur between what is engineering and what is composition and arrangement.
You recorded a Douglas September album [Oil Tan Bow,available fromamazon.com, cdbaby, and douglasseptember.com] at Cell Labs and encountered some problems with the sound in your studio. Tell me about those sessions.
Douglas is a singer-songwriter from Canada whom Michael Shrieve introduced to me. Douglas's singing is somewhere between Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Don Van Vliet — Captain Beefheart. Douglas and guitarist Robby Aceto wanted to make a live record, but my studio is not set up for that because it's only one room. I was the engineer and the producer. I'd rather be the producer and not so much the engineer, so there are some really amazing flaws in the recording, some of which I fixed, and some of which I didn't. [Laughs.] I mixed it in a couple of days.
How did you make September's live tracks work?
I just make do with what's around. Robby was playing a hollow-body Kay electric guitar through my direct-to-tape rig going straight to the computer. On one song, just for a hoot, I put a mic on Robby's guitar. Douglas was sitting next to him with a mic on his voice and one mic on his acoustic guitar, banging his foot on the floor, singing, and playing with the most extreme dynamic range. Naturally, there was all this bleed from Robby's guitar into Douglas's mic; there was no way around it. I was listening to the bleed into Doug's mic. On a lark, I muted Robby's direct-to-tape tracks for the beginning of the tune, and it sounded like he was playing a nice old National guitar. The bleed of Robby's guitar into Doug's vocal mic created a nice space, or air, around Doug's acoustic sound. So for the entire beginning of the tune, I didn't use the electric guitar at all. At some point in the middle, the electric guitar crept in and then exploded.
I love when stuff like that happens and it's serendipitous. When you're trying to capture somebody's inspiration onto a recording medium, it's so valuable to be open to things. It's just like improvising when you're playing. Sometimes the best things that happen when you're playing are train wrecks. You think, “This can't possibly be worth anything.” Then you go back and listen, and that's the best moment. The happy-accident paradigm, I think, is not to be dispensed with. That's maybe what makes some music great for longer periods of time. I probably won't listen to a Christina Aguilera record ten years from now. There's nothing wrong with it; it's just very controlled within boundaries that are rather narrow. I learned something working with my friend [producer] Craig Street: never let a moment go by in the studio that isn't recorded. I don't want to miss what happens with players if I'm producing, nor with myself if I'm playing. I just let it roll constantly, and then if I want to use the DAW, I'll edit it later.
I'll bet that those pleasantly surprising moments are what inspire you to go out to your studio every day.
Absolutely. These things make me feel enthusiastic, yet I know that it can all slow down. In a year, you might not be in demand, and you'll have to be extremely resourceful to try and get around those moments. That's why an insane person like me will do things like make sample libraries. I'm not just a guy who plays stringed instruments anymore: I'm a programmer; a remixer; a producer; a sample-library dude; and a guy who plays improvisational gigs in New York every couple of months for no money at all, just to do it. I try to get involved with manufacturers on new products that I think will help keep the progressive side of music actually progressive in some small way.
In the past couple of years, I have noticed that looping is sort of a hip thing to do. The kids think it's cool, and everybody does it. All of a sudden, there are magazines about looping and pieces of software like Acid or the new thing from Cycling '74, Radial, or boxes like the Repeater, which is an incredible breakthrough. It's pretty hip right now. For a guy like me, it's like, “Finally!” It's taken a while, but it's exciting to be active in some of this stuff. I'm planning on staying here for a while as well.
Matt Gallagheris an assistant editor atEM, Onstage, and Remix.
Glyph Technologies storage drives
Power Mac G3/300 MHz
Sony Vaio P3/128 MHz
DIGITAL-AUDIO INTERFACES
Echo Digital Audio Darla
MOTU 2408 hard-disk recording system
GUITARS, STRINGED INSTRUMENTS, AND AMPLIFIERS
Baglama saz from Turkey
Crews Maniac Sound amplified guitar
Fender Mini-Strat (high-strung; manufactured in Japan and no longer in production)
Fender Mustang (1965 model)
Gibson ES350T (1957 model)
Ithaca Stringed Instruments (2) acoustics
Kapa Continental (1965 model)
Kikuyaes (with homemade motorized bowing bridges)
Klein electrics (2)
Magnatone lap steel
Najarian electric ouds (2)
National Delphi
National Resonator (1992 model)
Rivera M100 amplifier with compensated line-out
Sho-Bud pedal steel
Supro lap steel
Teuffel Tesla custom electric
Tokai Strat with Veillette Baritone neck
MICROPHONES
Astatic Model G crystal mics (2)
beyerdynamic M 500 ribbon mic
CAD E-200 condenser mic
MadCat SaltShaker crystal mics (3)
Shure KSM32 condenser mic
Shure SM57 dynamic mics (2)
Genelec 1030A powered monitors
Bose car-stereo system (for critical listening in his car)
OUTBOARD PROCESSORS
ADA Ampulator tube power amp/speaker-cabinet emulator
ADA Microcab II stereo-miked guitar-cabinet emulator
Big Briar Moogerfooger MF-102 ring modulator
Boss EV-5 expression pedals (3)
Digital Pro with software by Aurisis Research
DigiTech VCS-1 tube compressor
DigiTech DHP-55 digital harmony processor
Electrix Filter Factory analog filter
Electrix Repeater loop-based digital recorder (beta version)
Guyatone FB-X Funky Box
Guyatone MD-2 Micro Digital Delay
Guyatone WR-2 Wah Rocker
Lexicon LXP-15II multi-effects processor
Lexicon PCM 42 digital delay processor (modified by Gary Hall and Bob Sellon)
Lexicon PCM 80 digital effects processor
Lexicon Reflex digital reverb
Mesa/Boogie Formula tube preamp
Oberheim GM1000 guitar processor
Oberheim/Trace Elliot Echoplex
Olympus varispeed microcassette recorder
Prescription Electronics Experience effects pedal
Prescription Electronics Throb effects pedal
Prescription Electronics Vibe-Unit effects pedal
Retrospec Squeeze Box
